Re: [Ltru] Fw: I-D Action:draft-burnett-pronunciation-alphabet-registry-00.txt

[Leif Halvard Silli <[e-mail]>]

Phillips, Addison, Wed, 16 Dec 2009 11:08:07 -0500:

> [..] the authors (they represent the W3C SSML [..] had reasons to seek
>  a  separate registry which didn't seem unreasonable to me at the time.
> 
> The main thing is that pronunciation schemes tend to be vendor 
> specific and are not necessarily transcriptions or, in fact, even 
> useful outside the speech synthesis process. It seems unlikely to me 
> that the language subtag registry would take in a wide variety of 
> these things, especially the vendor-specific variations.

They cease to be vendor specific when registered in the Pronunciation 
Registry (PR), just as windows-1252 has long ago ceased to be Windows 
specific. PR obviously should exist on its own. But perhaps it would be 
useful if there were cooperation between the PR and LTR:

* PR could be shaped more like LTR is. What about recommending 
"pinyin-2001" instead of "pinyin2001"? Then it would be easy to reuse 
'2001' in LTR, if requested. And 'fonipa' could be registered in the PR 
as an alias for 'ipa', to reflect the LTRU registry. 
* Many pronunciations alphabets are unregistered, and regardless of 
where they would registered first, the tag they would get in the first 
registration, could be a candidate for reuse in the other registry.

Examples of unregistered (anywhere) pronunciation alphabets that I am 
aware of:

* the Russian phonetic/pronunciation alphabet for use in education and 
teaching of Russian. It only uses a subset of the usual Russian 
Cyrillic letters + diacritical marks.
* Norvegia, for the notation of spoken/dialect Norwegian (in use since 
19th century) [1][2]
* Danish has the Danica alphabet and Swedish has a similar thing.[2]

I can already say that we ourselves in our teaching material efforts 
would have found it practical if there existed a LTR variant subtag for 
the Russian pronunciation alphabet.

[1] http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norvegia_(lydskrift)
[2] http://www.hum.uit.no/Forproven/Fagpresentasjoner/lydskrift.html
-- 
leif halvard silli